Welcome to the Happiness Podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Have you been feeling or seeing a lot of anger in our world lately?

But what happens when we hang on to our anger for too long? If you've ever been or known someone angry for a while, you probably realize that's not good.

But why is that? There's a famous quote that goes,

holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. We often

think that our anger is a weapon we throw at our enemies, but psychologically and

spiritually, anger is a fire we hold in our own hands.

We are the first ones to get burned.

Though we often think of violence in the forms of verbal or physical, did you know there's

actually a psychological violence?

It's an eternal act of dehumanization, reducing another person to a monster, an object, or an

obstacle in the privacy of our own mind.

And this causes us to suffer, even if we're right about the facts, but we're wrong in our

internal state, we still lose. Before we delve too deeply into this topic of drinking the poison,

I do want to make very clear that I'm not saying we shouldn't feel anger when we see injustice.

Anger can be healthy because it's a biological signal that a boundary has been crossed. But here's the distinction. Anger is a spark.

It is not the fuel. When we're experiencing injustice or see it in someone else's life,

anger is good for waking us up and starting the engines of change. We would call that the spark.

The fuel part of our anger is when we try to run

our lives on high octane fuel of hatred. The engine, our mind and body, will eventually

burn out. Our goal needs to be about sustainability. This is where we're able to keep our

peace so that we have the strength

to actually make a difference. Let's start by talking about the psychology and the science of the

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